Cinema: Rushes: Feb. 5, 1990

Dad's a swell guy. He has an easy rapport with his two sons that their tense mom (Jessica Lange) can't match. If he has a flaw, it's that he dies 15 minutes into a movie that is as tender and strained as his newly widowed wife. Men Don't Leave, written by Barbara Benedek and director Paul Brickman, gets promising when Lange lurches toward psychotic withdrawal from this grave new world, even as her kids accommodate themselves to it quickly. But a TV-movie moral awaits at the end, as comforting and predictable as a public-service commercial. For the real...